Chapter 124 - Book 2 Epilogue II

++Power attracts power.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

“Just tell me what you’re suggesting,” Aryqatan said at last. “I’ll decide for myself whether it was worth listening to. Your fate will be determined by my conclusion.” She needed to reassert some authority. To let Vornholt understand she would not enjoy a position of power in this negotiation.

But Vornholt didn’t flinch.

“You have not had a chance to send a report to Garamon, and you and I are among a single-digit number of people who saw any significant fraction of the events that befell Orapathaqi yesterday. That means that the narrative around this city, the ‘truth’, is entirely ours to decide.”

Aryqatan had to control her temper. “How much of this is your doing?” she asked Vornholt. It was a roundabout way of inquiring whether she’d been working for the liches, or somehow with them. The girl didn’t answer her, just remained silent.

Right, plausible deniability.

Aryqatan remembered the defiance in Vornholt, the tiny threads of it. The girl had been deferent in the open, but there’d always been that underlying spine of…resistance, almost. Aryqatan had felt constantly like she was watching someone bide their time, like she was being scrutinised for weakness by a hidden predator just waiting for its chance to strike.

Apparently, she’d now given off enough weakness to seem appealing as a target.

“You’re suggesting that I lie to the Gods,” Aryqatan said at last.

“Mainly, I am suggesting that you withhold information from your fellow Demigods,” the girl countered. “But really, I do not understand why you would show such loyalty to the Gods in the first place. Are they not ostracising you for the crimes committed by your patrons? Did they not leave a babbling fool in charge of this expedition, rather than your obviously more suited self?”

“Stop it,” Aryqatan snapped. And Vornholt stopped. But there was no fear in it, no sense of necessity. She seemed to have stopped viewing Aryqatan as a physical danger entirely. Ridiculous, she was sixteen. If Aryqatan turned to fighting her Vornholt’s lifespan would be measured in milliseconds.

That girl had one hell of a bluff.

“What would the story be?” Aryqatan asked at last.

“I believe the ancient lich known as Sakhent ambushed the Demigod Nu’chista, inflicting some curse upon him and drawing him into a battle he was not prepared for. He had been acting erratically for a while before that point, perhaps the curse had been festering for a while. You, however, were able to rally the magicians of Garamon and lead an assault against the lich, which was sadly too late to save Nu’chista, but succeeded in driving Sakhent off. The losses incurred were significant, however. Bagran Voret perished among the fighting, as did, shall we say, all the Godtouched and magicians who guarded my cell, along with many others. I was involved in this battle too of course, freeing myself harmlessly from Nu’chista’s imprisonment once it became clear that the enemy who had manipulated him into falsely condemning me was making their move. But it was my older brother who contributed the most.”

She spoke in such a casual way, mutating fact into fiction with the total disregard of a person for whom truth meant nothing at all. Perhaps it was a sign that the girl would go far in politics. Somehow, though, Aryqatan only felt disgust.

“You’ve thought about this a lot,” she noted. The little creep didn’t even show a flash of shame.

“I have had a lot of time to spend thinking, lately,” she noted.

Was she implying she’d planned for this even before the attack began?

No, she was just fucking with Aryqatan, trying to unbalance her. Well Aryqatan wouldn’t let it work.

“Get out,” she snapped. “And don’t ever show yourself to me again. I’ll think about what to do with you, and come for you when I’ve decided.”

Devouring her heart was an option, one that repeatedly made itself known in Aryqatan’s mind. Nu’chista had gained a great mass of power by eating the generational talent that was Bagran Voret, what would Aryqatan gain by consuming Isabel Vornholt, a girl so gifted as to leave world-class scholars convinced she wasn’t even human?

“What do you think will happen to you if you simply tell the truth?” Vornholt asked. She didn’t leave, blatantly ignoring the command of a Demigod and not looking the least bit apologetic. “You must know as well as I that you will be blamed for this. Do you intend to simply accept that?”

“I said get out,” Aryqatan told the girl. “I won’t warn you again.”

“You could leave this city with the credit for having saved it, known as the one who fought off Sakhent. You could be welcomed with open arms.” Vornholt just kept talking, and rather than grow angrier and more certain, Aryqatan felt her surety breaking away more with each new point leveled her way.

By the time the girl had finished tallying up everything deception stood to win her and everything honesty threatened to take, Aryqatan was no longer feeling so sure at all.

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“You’d keep this secret then,” she said at last. “And what, I’m supposed to just go on living with faith that you will? Put my existence in your hands and hope you never have a change of heart, or see a better opportunity for yourself to be won by betraying me?”

“I could give you my word,” Vornholt suggested. “Though I doubt you hold the word of magicians especially highly. Instead let me point out that my fate would be in your hands just as much as yours was in mine. You could cause my life in Garamon to crumble easily by sharing what you knew as well, and if I betrayed you I would be one interrogation away from having all my secrets exposed.”

She bargained like a demon, this girl. Like some vast thing from the dark ages, its forked tongue flicking out and coaxing ignorant humans away from their communal fires. Her eyes were so…empty.

“You could be a threat to me anyway. What if your mind is searched? A Demigod is immune to that sort of magic, a magician, though, is most certainly not.”

Mind-reading powers were rare, impractical and generally required a small fortune just to make use of, but with the scale of disaster at Orapathaqi, Aryqatan wouldn’t put it past anyone to try and make use of them to clear things up.

Vornholt only smiled.

“So long as a Demigod vouches for me, going to that sort of expense to read my mind would be the gravest insult possible. And this only gets more significant the higher your station grows.”

So Vornholt would have a vested interest in Aryqatan’s success as well. Damn it, but she bargained less like a devil and more like some logistician. Like life was some complex game with an optimal set of moves, and she just had to take her time to explain how the ones she wanted Aryqatan to make would most benefit Aryqatan herself.

“What were you doing with the necromancers of Orapathaqi?” she asked Vornholt again.

This time, the girl actually smiled.

“I was doing what I must,” she said.

Aryqatan never asked her again.

***

Sethira, Sakhent. Whatever she was, she was pacing. Her hands kept twitching, even now, half a day after the battle with Nu’chista. She was sore, her mind feeling, for the first time in a while, driven to its absolute limits. She hadn’t handled such vast amounts of mana for so long in…many thousands of years. She seemed to have gotten out of practice, and was feeling that atrophy now.

But more than that, she was feeling her painful relocation upon the world’s hierarchy of magical strength.

A Demigod had been defeated and sealed away before her very eyes, a city—her city—ruined almost beyond repair, and yet Sethira could not bring herself to linger on either fact.

The memory of Lord Dread consumed everything else.

“Am I interrupting something?” came a familiar voice, the very one whose owner Sethira had been thinking about. She turned to shoot a look across the deep chamber, past her gathered apprentices and followers, to land on Vornholt as she stepped into the room.

And Sethira felt genuine fear as she did, because this being was stronger than her.

“Good afternoon,” said Lord Dread. She wore her mortal face at the moment, that unthreatening mask of cold green eyes and pale skin. It had never looked more beautiful to Sethira than it did now, knowing the arcane miracle that was puppeting it.

“What are you here for?” Sethira asked. If she was to be sealed away, or even destroyed, then she wanted to cut to the chase. If not, she wanted to get this business over with so she could continue picking up the pieces of her ruined plans.

“I am here for you,” Dread replied. She looked around the room and men seemed to melt back from her gaze, like it was the glaring light of an unfiltered star.

“To kill me?” Sethira asked. Vornholt looked offended.

“I would sooner destroy every sculpture, poem and painting in every museum of arts in the world,” she replied. “No. I am here to accept your pledge of fealty, to take command of your cult, and to begin the long work of mastering mankind.”

A necromancer stepped forwards, his eyes bright with the fire of ignorance. Most here hadn’t seen Lord Dread in action, most didn’t know that he was in fact Isabel Vornholt.

And this one lacked the survival instincts that had all of his comrades so silent and trembling.

“Your ignorance is pathetic, girl,” he sneered. “Do you know who you’re addressing?” He gestured to Sethira, who didn’t bother to warn him. This was a pretty good chance to let her remaining followers see what was going on. “That is Sakhent himself.”

“Whore,” Vornholt said. The man frowned.

“...What?”

“Call me a whore,” she said.

His confusion was palpable, and he turned a questioning look towards Sethira. She nodded encouragingly.

“You’re…” The man frowned. “You’re a whore?”

Lord Dread’s power surged forth for just a moment, and by the time it receded the necromancer who had been so fearless before was little more than a stain of decomposed sludge on the stone.

Vornholt was Vornholt again before the smell hit Sethira’s nostrils.

“I have been waiting to respond in that way for a long time,” she smiled. “I hope that was a sufficient demonstration. In case it was not, your current master will now tell you all just how Sakhent measures up to my power.”

Sethira felt tempted to attack, but even if Sakhent had been at full power, which he was not, she would not have been able to overcome Vornholt. The hundred necromancers in this room with her would have been akin to one hundred rats.

But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they wouldn’t betray Sakhent over something as petty as her being weaker than an adversary, so long as—

“Orapathaqi’s histories, its books and knowledge,” someone called out as they stepped forward. Sethira recognised the priestess girl, Nesariyah, just as she came to stop before Vornholt. “You said you memorised it all, right?”

Vornholt seemed oddly pleased to see such a defiant glare in the other woman.

“No,” she replied. “But I memorised much of it. I would estimate…yes, sixty million words of your people’s knowledge have been recorded in my mind. They will never fade.”

“And you can give us that knowledge back?” Nesariyah asked.

“I can transcribe it all, as a gift for my new subordinates.”

Sethira saw her grip on the necromancers weaken. Many more stepped forwards, just as Nesariyah did, won over by the promise of seeing Garamon’s damage to their culture reversed in this small way. Vornholt turned to Sethira next.

“Our goals still align,” she pointed out. “Do you really want to make an enemy of me when we work against the Gods themselves?”

In the end, Sethira didn’t.